Joe Rogan: And you have to tell them what the pit’s for, or you just say ‘hey, we just want to dig a hole’.
Elon Musk: I just filled out this form.
Joe Rogan: That’s it.
Elon Musk: Yeah, it was a pit in our parking lot.
Joe Rogan: But do you have to give them some sort of blueprint from your ultimate idea, and do they have to approve it? Like, how does that work?
Elon Musk: We just started off with the pit.
Joe Rogan: Okay.
Elon Musk: They don’t really care about the existential nature of a pit. You just say, like, I want a pit. It’s a hole in the ground. Then we got the permit for the pit, and we dug the pit in like, I don’t know, three days, two, three days. Actually, I think two, 48 hours, something like that. Because Eric Garcetti was coming by for the Hyperloop; he was going to attend the Hyperloop competition, which is a student competition we have for who can make the fastest pod in the Hyperloop. And he was coming.
The finals were going to be on Sunday afternoon, and so Eric was coming by on Sunday afternoon. I was like, you know, we should take this pit and then show Eric. So, we – this was like Friday morning, and then – yeah, it was about a little over 40 hours later, we dug the pit. It was like when 24/7 – 48 straight hours, something like that. And dug this big pit, and we showed Eric the pit. Like, obviously it’s just a pit. But hey, a hole in the ground is better than no hole in the ground.
Joe Rogan: And what did you tell him about this pit? I mean, you just said this is the beginning of this idea.
Elon Musk: Yes.
Joe Rogan: We’re going to build tunnels under L.A. to help funnel traffic better, and there you go? And they just go ‘okay’? We’ve joked around about this in the podcast before that, like, what other person can go to the people that run the city and go ‘hey, we’re going to dig some holes in the ground and put some tunnels in there’, and they go ‘oh yeah, okay’.
Elon Musk: It’s just another hole in the ground. People dig holes in the ground all the time.